Saturday, February 25, 2012

Bioethicists: Infanticide for social reasons is A-OK

They argue that both the fetus and the new-born infant are only potential persons without any interests. Therefore the interests of the persons involved with them are paramount until some indefinite time after birth. To emphasise the continuity between the two acts, they term it “after-birth abortion” rather than infanticide.

Yeah, infanticide that sounds so....judgemental.

Congratulations, feminists!

Your discrimination of the fetus has led to this. Fetuses are "not that important" so infants aren't either.

Killing an infant after birth is not euthanasia either. In euthanasia, a doctor would be seeking the best interests of the person who dies.But in “after-birth abortion” it is the interests of people involved, not the baby.

How long after birth is it “ethically permissible” to kill infants? Guibilini and Minerva leave that question up to neurologists and psychologists, but it takes at least a few weeks for the infant to become self-conscious. At that stage it moves from being a potential person to being a person, and infanticide would no longer be allowed.

I can just see the next stage: but if women aren't allowed to kill their infants after the 21-day limit, they'll be criminalized for simply doing what women before that had the right to do.

I'd like to suggest that this kind of talk is actually hate speech and that the laws that prohibit provoking violence on a group of people be applied here. But of course, it's only infants, so who really cares, right?